On Jan. 9, 2025, Coach Marcus Freeman’s Fighting Irish will battle Coach James Franklin’s Nittany Lions for a spot in college football’s national championship game. Regardless of who wins, a Black head coach will move on to contend for the FBS national championship title for the first time in history.
This historic Orange Bowl has been shaped by the struggle over race and place embedded within the history of the bowl game itself and its host city, Miami. For almost a century, the Orange Bowl has demonstrated the power of sport as a contested space, as white boosters and Black players used the bowl to promote the city—redefining the game in the process.
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First played in 1935, the Orange Bowl was the product of New Deal funds, as Miami struggled to redefine itself after the devastating hurricane of 1926 and the stock market crash of 1929. Civic leaders formed the Greater Miami Athletic Association to bring more tourists from the U.S. and Latin America for “Football in the Tropics.” Jack Bell, who was a member of the Orange Bowl Committee and sports editor for the Miami Herald argued, “Miami is the ideal – you might say only – spot in the southeastern section of the United States in which to stage a big New Year’s Day attraction.” All of Florida was on board.
The game racially integrated in 1955, following the Cotton Bowl (1948) and Sun Bowl (1950), which finally refused to honor the longstanding “gentlemen’s agreement” in college football to bench Black players from northern teams when playing in the segregated south.
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Miami had become known as the Magic City, built on white boosterism and segregated Black labor from the U.S. South and the Bahamas; it had long reinscribed the traditional racial order of the Old South even as it sold itself as a part of a new one. Integration represented white boosters’ commitment to elevating the bowl over racial tradition by bringing in the best teams and players in the nation, regardless of race. On Jan. 1, 1965, the Texas versus Alabama Orange Bowl was the first bowl game televised live in primetime.
For Miami and the rest of the country, the Orange Bowl went on to hold a storied place in selling America’s favorite winter playground. It grew up alongside the city, moving from 5,134 spectators in 1935 to a sellout crowd of more than 80,000 in 1975. By that time, the Orange Bowl Festival, which included the college football game, parade, and other sporting events, had arguably become the state’s most successful annual event. The Orange Bowl stadium now hosted regular season games for the University of Miami Hurricanes and the city’s professional team, the Miami Dolphins.
The iconic stadium amplified the Hurricanes’ regular season play, as the mid-20th century program received two Orange Bowl invites among other notable achievements.
Even after desegregation, promotional material for the Orange Bowl largely centered on and celebrated white play, showcasing the economic and racial ideals of what was now called the Sunbelt South which encouraged the migration of white middle-class families to the “Florida-California Sun country.”
The expansion of the Orange Bowl, however, was not just a white man’s game. Another football contest emerged as Black southerners challenged their social exclusion from the sport and the Orange Bowl. From 1947 to 1978, the Orange Bowl served as the site of the Orange Blossom Classic, a de facto national championship for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) recently revived in 2021.
According to the rich scholarship of Derrick White and the Black College Football Hall of Fame, HBCUs, of which more than 90 were established between 1837 and 1900, began playing football in 1892. By the early 1900s, programs faced off in midseason “classics” that showcased the history of HBCUs and Black college football. The Orange Blossom Classic modeled itself after the Rose Bowl, the oldest and most prestigious college football bowl game, seeking to position cross-country teams in an end-of-the-season showdown.
By the mid-1960s, the Orange Blossom Classic was the first and only Black college football game televised. It helped standout Black athletes barred from predominantly white institutions (PWIs) find a way to the NFL. In the 1968 NFL draft, the Southwestern Athletic Conference (SWAC), an all-Black conference, supplied 31 players in contrast to the all-white Big Ten’s 29. Notably not one of those players faced a white football team or played regularly on television or in invited NCAA All-Star games.
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Black college football was not alone in utilizing the Orange Bowl as a space for reinvention. By the end of the 1970s, the University of Miami Hurricanes football program, like Miami itself, had lost its luster. In 1979, Coach Howard Schnellenberger became the program’s eighth head coach in ten years with a familiar promise: the program would win a national championship in five years. Unlike white boosters and coaches before him, he recognized the value of local Black talent to making it a reality. He signed 15 local players for his second season and 22 for his third. At the end of the 1983 season, when the team headed to the Orange Bowl for the national championship game, 64 of the 86 players were from Florida. Almost half of the program was Black.
Schnellenberger fielded more Black players than any other college program previously. He persuaded local talent on the chance to play in the Orange Bowl stadium in front of a hometown crowd, a feat many had already accomplished for standout Black high school teams like the Northwestern Bulls (Liberty City) and Jackson Generals (Allapattah). Liberty City and Allapattah are two historical Black neighborhoods which, alongside Coconut Grove, have rich football legacies. According to the STARZ docuseries Warriors of Liberty City (2018), as of 2017, “Miami had 47% more players in the NFL than any other city.” Many came from these neighborhoods.
Through the efforts of local Black phenoms like Reggie Sutton and Eddie Brown, Fred Robinson and Rodney Bellinger, Alonzo Highsmith and Melvin Bratton, the Hurricanes secured their first national championship on Jan. 2, 1984. The Hurricanes ended the decade “the team of the 1980s,” winning two more national championships. They also challenged a blue-blood style of play. Blue bloods are the most elite programs in college football like Notre Dame and Penn State, recognized for a more understated on-the-field presence.
As mythologies of Black deviancy and inadequacy circulated in the 1980s through the image of the “welfare queen” to help argue for a war on poverty and drugs, the Hurricanes’ swagger foregrounded a new face for college football and style, amplifying exemplary Black collegiate play in the process. By the end of the 1980s, Miami football and college football, in general, was king.
On Thursday night, Marcus Freeman and James Franklin will step onto this stage and into this history. They will showcase Black athletic and coaching talent for the most elite programs in college football in one of the most iconic bowls in the nation. Their ability to break into the blue-blood system and dominate represents an opportunity to advance changes in football leadership that have stalled even as Black players have gained recognition and fame on the field. When Miami Times columnist Ebenezer C. Edwards wrote his regular column, “Across the Board with Scrooge,” for the leading Black weekly newspaper in South Florida in 1970, he noted that Black players made up 40% of the NFL but only accounted for four assistant coaches of the 190 coaches in total. In 2024, despite over half of college football players identifying as Black, Black head coaches still comprise only 12% of the league: 16 of 134 teams.
On Jan. 20, MLK Day, either Freeman or Franklin has the potential to change history again, becoming the first Black coach to win a national championship. Regardless of whether they win, they represent, perhaps most importantly, that a change is gonna come. In fact, it has been many decades in the making.
Kate Aguilar is an assistant professor of African American and sports history at Gustavus Adolphus College. Her research focuses on the intersection of Black student activism and the Black athlete at the University of Miami (Fla.).
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
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